Bracebridge As It Was - I Need To Know It Again
Since my father Ed died in late January, of this year, I’ve tried to reconcile a lot of things. Aspects of my teenage years that frankly, I’ve been unsure about for several decades. Some nagging personal questions about my days growing up in Bracebridge, Ontario. Not that there was anything particularly troubling, in my rapscallion, terrorizing forays into neighborhood peace and quiet. I think it’s more a case that I haven’t given as much retrospective to my Alice Street days, as they most certainly deserve, in this sudden reassessment of how I got from there to here.....still writing after all these decades. Just as I did as a fledgling writer, frustrated and unsure of myself for years, I sometimes now, will startle myself with the question, "why write at all?" The last day in Ed and Merle’s apartment, at Bass Rock, having one last look at their newly barren former retirement nest, I couldn’t help but recall the words of the song, that went something like..... "Is that all there is.....if that’s all there is, then let’s break out the booze and have a party." Forgive my liberalities with the words.
Looking out the third floor balcony, and then scanning the sad, empty, clean, hollow apartment, inspired another whispered verse of the same...."Is that all there is?" I’ve never been too sure about the reasons I can’t stop writing. While our family was distraught about Ed’s passing, for me it was a time to write, and for weeks after, I sat at this keyboard for lengthy jags, in one of the most prolific periods I’ve ever experienced. I wanted to write. Wanted to sit uncomfortably at this computer and pound out copy, haunted, driven, as if I knew the end was coming for me as well. Maybe that was it more than anything else. I was scared of being on my deathbed and feeling I’d left tasks unfulfilled. Even at 85 years of age, Ed wanted to do more with his life. Alas, his time had run out. I felt for the first few weeks, as if this had been his message to me. Don’t dilly dally son! Don’t question the desire to write. It’s not an important or necessary analysis. Fulfilling your ambitions is most significant. If this was his paranormal footstep into my life, it was a welcome intervention.
It was Ed who brought us, as a young family, to Muskoka, in early 1966, from Burlington, which was well on its way to becoming a major Southern Ontario city. While Ed used to say we moved to the hinterland because of a good job opportunity, when that went bust after only a few months, we certainly didn’t hit the road again. We stayed, and I’ve always felt he kept us here because it was a good and gentle place, with a much less stressful pace, to raise a family and, enjoy life. He was pretty disappointed his dream job fell through but I never remember hearing, even once in those next few years, of any plan to move back to the urban jungle. He did us all a great favor in life, because of course, we would have moved south again for the same reason we had come to Muskoka. Ed and Merle needed work. Merle did recognize however, that remaining in a small town did mean lesser opportunities, and for quite a few years, she had to work as a shop clerk to make ends meet, as there were few jobs in banking, a career she had enjoyed in the city.
My fascination, for many years, was our time living in a three story apartment, up on Alice Street, owned by Wayne and Hilda Weber, two unique but kindly folks who had nothing in common with each other, beyond the ownership of the property. They fought like the proverbial cat and dog but they were soft on each other most of the time. She called him Satchmo, and he was very careful to call her the boss. They lived in the small house next door. Wayne and his father had built the apartment, using brick from the former Bracebridge public school, which was being replaced with a more modern facility. I think they also had a hand in building the new one, though I may be mistaken.
Alice Street occupied my life, from my early teens up to the driving, dating and drinking milestones. So I have an unconditional loyalty to that short stretch of asphalt, up on the town’s northwestern plateau, called Hunt’s Hill, named after a prominent early businessman / banker. I think it was a more profound period for me, than most kids my age, because without really planning for a career, I was becoming more active with pen and paper. My first legitimate forays into short story writing came in Grade Six, at Bracebridge Public School, and these were war tomes, that accompanied some very basic drawings as part of a comic book project. I wasn’t a very good artist but I could write pretty well. I didn’t become prolific as a teenage writer, that’s for sure but I did like this kind of composition. My next adventures were in essay writing and oral presentation.....which like most kids, scared the hell out of me but made me crazy for the theatrics and celebrity of it all. Writing the essay well, and then making a good show during the public speaking competition, was a chance at major self-promotion, worth all the nervous sweating leading up to the podium limelight. As a new kid in town, anything I could do to win over classmates, including the generous provision of Merle’s freshly baked cookies, were big positives in the school’s pecking order.
I didn’t win, or place above tenth, and my finish was most likely closer to the bottom than the top but creative writing seemed a good fit at the time. When I eventually went off to York University, in the autumn of 1974, I was enrolled in english and creative writing. When I graduated, I did so as an "historian." Somehow in that first year, I decided that becoming a novelist or poet was out of the question. I couldn’t even read a work of fiction. Never have, except a wee bit of Washington Irving and Charles Dickens. I was a non-fiction loyalist, and if I was going to write, it would not be compromised by make-believe, and a theme that couldn’t be supported by hard fact. Even as a bookseller, I don’t have more than a few novels, and the only reason they’re still on my bookshelf is that they were written and autographed by friends, or signed first editions of major works. That I can live with as a capital investment. I write a lot of "actuality" these days, particularly with my outdoor pieces, all that have been experienced in person, not simply via imagination. Every now and again I will write something that appears to be fiction, and is written such that a reader may assume it was created and not fully experienced. On each occasion however, the copy was indeed based entirely on real events, and actual experiences I’ve enjoyed, or endured over a lifetime. I’m kind of flattered when someone comments on my vivid imagination. I won’t correct them. That’s not as important as the fact they liked something I wrote, fiction or non-fiction. A writer can never have too much positive input. Especially when you can get a dump-truck load of the opposite.
Shortly after graduating university, I took a job as a cub reporter with Muskoka Publications, and before I was in my mid twenties, I was editor of our hometown newspaper, The Herald-Gazette. I was in heaven. It was a remarkable period of my writing life. I enjoyed every minute. I hated office politics though, and the conflict between writing and being a manager, ended in my own failure to compromise. I wanted to write and be published, not tangle with management over what I felt were routinely moot and ridiculous issues. When one of my overseers, who had been appointed after an amalgamation of publications, suggested that he was going to "nurture his writing staff, like flowers in a garden," I knew it was time to plan an exit strategy. I opened my antique business as a direct result of statements like this. In the short term, I did remind this chap to never again use the flower-watering analogy in my presence. They continued to use the same therapy over the next couple of years, and I’d had quite enough. I didn’t mind being nurtured but by someone more worldly than me, and who I looked up to for leadership. I quit!
I have re-visited many times, those so called "creative" years, living up in that modest, blue collar neighborhood of old Bracebridge. It was the palette for so many writing forays, of which a majority failed to earn me fame, fortune or any significant recognition as a writer at all. In the early 1990's, long after my Herald-Gazette years, I wrote a column in a paper known as The Muskoka Advance, and I called it "Bracebridge Sketches," I believe. In this well received weekly editorial, I wrote about those wonderful days of budding teenage-hood, and all the buddies and good neighbors we had in that ballywick of ours. It ran for many years and it was by far my most successful project that only ended when I ran out of reminiscences.....or at least I thought I did!
There were a few hard-assers out there who didn’t like the idea of a relative newcomer, writing about their hometown history, as if I had a vested pioneer interest. This haunted me for a couple of decades until a married a local girl with family roots, dating back to the first tilled soil, during the Homestead Land Grant period of the 1800's. I gained inherent rights simply by marrying into one of Muskoka’s founding families.....which was okay, and I’ve thanked my wife many times since, for giving me a boost in status in local heritage matters. The point is, my history back in the 60's, was more about my own nostalgic days hanging out at Toronto Street’s corner stores, Blacks (then Lil & Cec’s) and Bamfords, also known as Woodley Park Cottages and Corner Store. And I reported on the rapscallion friends of mine who made the whole Hunt’s Hill gang so dynamic and adventure-keen.
Only a few days after Ed’s death, I took a couple of trips up from his apartment (which we had to clean out), up the Hunt’s Hill incline, and found myself waxing nostalgic in front of the former Weber apartments. I could see Ed and I tossing the baseball around on the front lawn, while my mother Merle sat in a lawn chair with Hilda Weber, enjoying a spring evening and a cup of freshly brewed tea. It was so clear to me. So vivid. It was as if I could have jumped out of the car, and made a threesome for the ball toss. I was looking back on my own history, almost the same as when I’d be house-bound with a cold or the flu, and watch from our third floor window, as another kid in the apartment played catch with his dad.
I said to my wife one day recently, that I would cherish the opportunity to rent our old apartment, and for the period of a year, write daily about those early years, long before I’d authored my first significant essay. I’d like to experience the hollow echoes of those family and apartment moments, that made me want to write. Events that begged to be recorded for posterity, anecdotes which made up the strange mosaic of thoughts and inspirations, living in close quarters to so many other effervescent souls. Not to herald a sad re-visitation of a now-gone family but to investigate what it was, about that simple, humble, two bedroom accommodation, the basic, uncomplicated life and scenes of every day life, that pushed me to compose, or plan for it one day. I knew it would become an important impetus in my writing career. I just didn’t know how much, until a few years ago.....at a time I suppose, when I considered an early retirement due to lack of interest.
When we moved from Alice Street, in the mid 1970's, it was, in my mind, a necessary progression, and I didn’t look back once, or even visit over that next decade. I couldn’t have cared less about the Weber apartments. Yet I have a strange and haunting feeling that it was this fundamental failure to reckon with its attachments to my soul, which has caused me so many heartaches in my own recent history. As I held my father’s hand and made peace with his passing, content we were best buddies to the end, I had left Alice Street without so much as a passing glance, without even the slightest recognition of what it had all meant to the young author-apprentice. I had owed it, at least in my own heart, a sincere credit for the way it nurtured me in a most positive way. It was a safe neighborhood that harbored many fine citizens, and they all helped me, in one way or another (sometimes plain old discipline) adjust to life in a new community. As I am a big believer in bestowing credit to those places and associates who have helped me in the past, I was guilty of a terrible neglect. This is what I would like to correct, for my own peace of mind, and for my boys, Andrew and Robert, so one day they will more clearly understand, the interesting nuances of their nostalgic, history burdened father,...... looking to comfort his own lost wee ghost, still hustling with enthusiastic spirit, playing road hockey in the dim lamplight, on all those snowy winter evenings, in front of the Alice Street apartment......with that familiar echo from the player /narrator..... "He shoots, he scores."
I may not be able to move back to our old apartment, as I might wish, but it won’t stop me from writing about the old neighborhood, as if I was still looking out that third floor window. See, I do have an imagination. I just won’t write a novel any time soon. The insights, I hope, will also remind you of your own childhood ballywicks, which were all interesting and entertaining places, with their own unique characteristics, held special in reminiscence.....the good, the bad, happy and sad, for reasons we will never truly understand......but that’s of little importance or consequence to our journey. Discovery is the holy grail! Please join me this spring for a trip to our respective childhood neighborhoods - consider mine your own, and enjoy. Just like the old Hollywood flick, "Our Town," there’s something grand and wonderful about the way a hometown impresses subtly upon the soul, such that even if we hated it, and couldn’t wait to move away...... and never gave it a second thought, its essence lives in concert, in biography, ever after.